Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Sunday, December 30, 2012

One in Eight Office Workers Checked Their Corporate Portal on Christmas Eve

Twelve percent of Bitrix24 users accessed their corporate networks on Christmas Eve and seventeen percent did on Christmas Day, according to internal statistics.

"With 35,000 small businesses signing up with Bitrix24 in the last six months, we have a real good feel of how new social enterprise tools are changing work patterns. Even a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that so many office workers would feel the urge to do some work on Christmas," said Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov.

According to Bitrix, Inc. internal statistics, 12% of Bitrix24 users accessed their corporate networks on Christmas Eve and 17% percent did on Christmas Day.

Instant messaging (47%) was by far the most popular activity type, followed by document sharing (11%) and task tracking (9%). The owners of mobile devices were even more active – 17% of iPhone and iPad users were active on Christmas Eve and 19% on Christmas Day, while the number for active Android users were 15% and 21% respectively.

"The line between work and home is getting more and more blurry, especially as mobile devices become so ubiquitous. I use my iPhone as much for my work as I do for talking with my wife and daughters," added Mr. Valyanov.

Not all countries felt the same urge to work on the holidays. Twenty two percent of Bitrix24 users residing in US were active on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, followed by Canada (20%) and United Kingdom (17%). Germany, Poland, Brazil and Italy were among the more ‘laid back’ nations, with 11%, 11%, 9% and 6% of Bitrix24 users checking in.

Making it to Harvard or other prestigious universities is not a privilege granted to just about anyone. Academic success is one prerequisite for acceptance. Aaron Harris, a Harvard alum who also happens to be the CEO and co-founder of Tutorspree, thinks that in making it to a high-caliber scholastic institution, high-quality tutoring plays an integral role.

Easier said than done, you might say, as finding capable tutors isn’t a walk in the park, which is why Harris and his buddies, Ryan Bednar and Josh Abrams, recognizing the need to solve substantial inefficiencies in the tutoring sector, started Tutorspree.

Tutorspree is a tutoring marketplace that aims to bridge the gap between students and parents who are unsatisfied with the methods by which they connect and work with tutors and tutors who are not happy with the manner they find new students. With Tutorspree, locating reliable and qualified tutors in the student’s locale is made easier.

The website allows a user to search through its database of carefully selected tutors by supplying location information. They are then able to view tutor profiles that list their achievements, educational background and work history. Once a tutor is selected, Tutorspree provides secure payment processing options, as well as feedback tools. Aside from location, a user can also search for a tutor by subject and hourly rate.

Tutorspree tutors are professional teachers, writers, grad students, test prep gurus, language instructors and educators with extensive tutoring experience. To be qualified, aside from the necessary credentials, each prospective tutor undergoes a background check and an internal screening process. Harris estimates that 40% to 50% of applicants are turned away.

Signing up as a tutor with Tutorspree is free, but a commission will be charged on all payments received for services via the company - 50% for the first lesson and a flat rate of approximately $5 for each follow-up lesson.

With Tutorspree, parents and students no longer need to flock to Craigslist or community message boards (both actual and virtual) to find tutors whose qualifications they won’t be able to gauge until it’s too late. On the other end of the spectrum, tutors no longer need to go through the rigors of self-promotion but are instead entered into a trustworthy database.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Awesome Startups - PickyDomains.com

Daily Advice Link - How I Increased Sales 350% With Press-Releas
So
you came up with an idea for an online business and started
thinking of a great domain name for it, only to realize that all the
good domain names are already taken. Then you tried automatic domain
name generation tools, but most of the name they generated didn’t
make any sense. What to do now? Well, just crowdsource your domain
name idea generation to PickyDomains.
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is a cool service that offers 100% risk free domain name and
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record of generating great domain names, and business slogans such
as SEOBook for Aaron Wall, eMomsAtHome Wendy Piersall, and
SurefireMarketing for Yanik Silver.

How Does it Work?

To
get started, you have to deposit amount depending upon the service
you need. For domain name suggestions, the fee is $50. For business
slogan suggestions, its $75. You can use credit card, paypal or
wire transfer to deposit the money. Note that this money is only a deposit, which means if you don’t like any of the domain names suggested by them, you get a full refund.
After
payment, you send them more details about the site you are
starting, and characteristics of the domain name you need, like
preferred extensions, length, and hyphenated or not. After that just
wait and watch as people start suggesting the names.
You must check the suggested names periodically and mark them Liked or Disliked to indicate your taste. Once you find the domain you like, just mark it Picked to complete your order.
There
are more then 44,000 registered contributors at Pickydomains right
now, which means you can get what you are looking for within a few
days, or sometimes, within few hours!

Become A Contributor And Make Some Money

You
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Just register as a contributor and log into your account. Then, check
the available orders to see if you can come up with some good
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To get great domain name suggestions and business name ideas, check out PickyDomains.com.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Alegion.com review

From the words “crowd” plus “outsourcing,” crowdsourcing is not new news (see PickyDomains or DoNanza). It has been around for a while, and given the many advantages (productivity, cost-effectiveness, timely results, etc.) it can bring, especially in this highly competitive technology-driven world, is here to stay.

Launched on November 20, 2012 at the Amazon AWS re:Invent conference, Alegion aims to provide large enterprises the ability to incorporate crowdsourced work into their complex business processes via its ground-breaking self-service crowdsourcing platform. According to Nathaniel Gates, Alegion’s co-founder and CEO, crowdsourcing hasn’t really taken off, no thanks to the fact that users stay away from crowdsourcing because of the perception that results are generally inaccurate and that there’s no surefire way to ensure the accuracy of such results.

Gates recognizes that the problem with crowdsourcing has nothing to do with the platform or the workers, but with the process. He also insists that when users – businesses or individuals – fail to generate the desired results from their crowdsourcing endeavors, it is because they are not asking the right questions or following proven best practices to guarantee accuracy.

Another reason enterprises aren’t taking advantage of the full gamut of benefits they can gain from crowdsourcing is the complicated nature of setting up a crowdsourcing infrastructure in-house, which normally takes up a lot of resources. With Alegion, continuous development and expensive business consultants are no longer needed as everything will now be made available. With Alegion, companies design their workflow processes to ensure work accuracy, including a scoring system that will allow them to build a workforce fit for certain tasks. Companies will also be able to see job-related data so they can perform their own analyses and find out what went well and what didn’t, and everything else they want to track.

What’s more remarkable about Alegion is job creators’ ability to interact with their workers, answer questions, provide rewards and bonuses, even categorize their workers into groups, like those who constantly provide outstanding work and those who might need some help.

Gates points out that if users treat crowdsourcing as a system – data in, data out – they are unlikely to find satisfaction with the results.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Hot Startups - DashBell

Nowadays, if you run a lodging business, even an independent bread-and-breakfast, and your business can't be found online, expect to be left behind and trampled by the rest of the pack. The Internet has interconnected the world in so many ways. Travelers now book accommodations online. If your online presence is relatively nil, you're practically throwing away a big piece of the pie that is your target population.

That said, however, small lodgings and independent hotels may still experience some setbacks while managing bookings via Expedia and Booking.com. Keeping up-to-date inventories in these sites entails constantly logging to each one, updating calendars, the number of rooms you have available and such, which can be time-consuming, to say the least.

Dashbell, a startup with headquarters based in Boston, is developing a product called OpenTable for independent hotels which will allow small lodgings to synchronize their online listings with their own systems. Meaning, the moment they update their systems, their online listings are automatically updated as well.

According to Paige Brown, Dashbell's co-founder and CEO, the company plans to beta launch in January, with initial focus on Brazil. Brazil is a country with a $12 billion hotel bookings market, 75% of which are independent. Of the 75%, only 4% are currently listed online. Dashbell intends to assist as many hotels as possible make the shift to online bookings before the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In the United States, there are far fewer independent hotels. Still, Dashbell isn't closing its doors to independent hotels in the country. Brown believes that a considerable number of small bread-and-breakfasts might benefit from using Dashbell in the future. By the end of the year, Dashbell expects to secure funding in the amount of $400,000 to $500,000 from angel investors.

Thursday, December 06, 2012

PayLab Networks Wants To Marry Vendine Machines With Smartphones

Smartphones are on the rise, and the upward movement is yet to see a decline, which, as industry experts believe, is not going to happen anytime soon. Smartphones today had gotten smarter, are cross-generational, and voice calling is just one of their many features. If you take time to observe people at coffee shops, airports, even in planes, not a lot of them use the smartphone for voice calls. Most of them actually read, swipe and tap. With a smartphone, Internet access is right at the user's fingertips. Music, high quality cameras, downloadable entertainment apps, what else is there?

On the business side of the equation, with these mobile devices, businesses can now engage with customers, advertise their services, pay bills, accept payments, etc.

Speaking of paying bills and accepting payments, there is this new smartphone app and point-of-sale device called PayLab that allows vending machine operators to effortlessly receive payments from over 100 million North American clients. PayLab enables customers carrying smartphones to easily pay for their purchases while eliminating exuberant fees slapped by cashless systems.

According to Mike Gron, PayLab's founder, the accelerating credit card fees borne by both consumers and merchants has opened up windows of opportunities for various types of payment solutions, and he saw vending as a perfect avenue to explore what can be done with a little ingenuity and market know-how. Mike Gron adds that the hardware engineering and testing had been both challenging and interesting.

One big contributor to Mike Gron's success was his willingness to get to know his audience. He spent a great deal of time in warehouses and trucks trying to understand the ins and outs of the industry. When asked which was more difficult, raising capital or finding the right talent, he explained that getting one without the other is going to be a challenge. Staying affiliated with the local tech community and keeping people informed of developments (or the lack thereof) is important.

Just recently, PayLab was presented at the Plug and Play Launch and Startup Showdown, an event with investors from Silicon Valley and Calgary, as well as at the Start Up Calgary Launch Party that took place on November 14. Currently, PayLab is trying to raise an initial round of financing for production ramp-up.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Six years ago, Jeff Howe coined term crowdsourcing to describe the process of outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. However, more and more companies are now turning to internal crowdsourcing, according to Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov.

"We are seeing a significant shift now. Whereas a few years ago companies would simply outsource their work through eLance.com or other crowdsourcing sites [see DoNanza story], now they are using more and more 'internal crowdsourcing', that relying on collaboration among their own employees to produce results. Having seen the potential of crowdsourcing through external experience, they are trying to replicate this effective method inside the company when possible."

Social enterprise networks, also known as social intranets, are the driver behind this change. With major software companies from Microsoft to SalesForce investing hundreds of millions of dollars, it's clear that this trend will continue to develop intensely.

"Virtually every major client we have uses an extranet to bring freelancers and contractors into the fold. They are now using crowdsourcing sites only to locate suitable candidates, while actual collaboration is happening on their own platform. This makes sense, because a social intranet typically has the necessary collaboration tools, while crowdsourcing sites usually solve other problems – like payments, for example, or providing feedback about freelancers or clients."

Bitrix24 has experienced rapid growth since its launch in April 2012 and was recently praised by Forbes.com, thanks in part to its decision to target small businesses, rather than the large business segment targeted by other social intranet providers. Over 15000 companies have signed up for the service so far.

"We've made Bitrix24 absolutely free to any company with 12 employees or fewer. We really do believe that the future of social intranet is in small to midsize companies. Once the advantages and the ease of adoption are demonstrated, it's really an easy sell from that point."

JustBecause Is One Hot App This Holiday Season

If you’re an entrepreneur, when launching a startup, one of the early challenges involved are getting the word out about your product or service, letting your target consumer know of the benefits that come with it and getting people to try it out – all in the name of converting them into lifetime customers.

On the other hand, if you’re somebody thinking of sending a gift to someone special, one hurdle you need to clear is figuring out what this trendy friend of yours would be thrilled to receive. And this means ensuring the gift isn’t something he/she already received from someone else, which, needless to say, can sometimes be a tough one to pull off.

JustBecause, a newly launched iPhone app, bridges the gap between the two. With JustBecause, users can now offer their friends gifts from startups worth $10 to $100 for just $1. Yes, you read right – for just $1!

Why? Well, startups are more than glad to dole out freebies here and there (in the hopes of turning a first-time user into a permanent consumer, what else?), and simply charge the expense against their customer acquisition funds. And because the gifts are from startups, as a consumer, you can rest assured that these products or services are stuff most people haven’t tried yet.

According to Matt Hartman, co-founder of JustBecause, the app was spun from his first startup, ReferBoost, an apartment referral social lead generator. To encourage apartment residents to write reviews and post about the buildings they lived on, they gave out gift cards, usually from Starbucks.

Meanwhile, Uber, one of the startups currently in JustBecause’s lineup, was trying to acquire customers in Chicago. This, then, prompted Hartman to talk to Uber. Uber thought the idea was interesting and provided him with some cards. The limiting factor though was the number of buildings Hartman had on his system. This, in turn, led to the idea that is now JustBecause.

JustBecause requires a Facebook login. Gift codes provided only work for first-time users, and for the gifts to be shared, the sender posts to a friend’s wall. SMS sharing is something that might come into play in the future.

Based in Chicago, JustBecause is, at the moment, working hard to expand its current startup roster. To download the app, visit their website at www.justbecauseapp.com.